The Tenderness of Thieves

by Donna Freitas

  I picked up the broken necklace.

  Watched as it dangled from my fingers, swaying so gently through the air.

  Looked from one mosaic blue heart to the other that rested against my chest.

  There were footsteps on the stairs. Thump, thump, thump.

  Coming toward me.

  It was in this moment that Handel returned, that he walked into his room and saw me standing there, hypnotized by the seemingly innocent swing of the necklace in my hands, of the heart at the end of it. My heart. The one that told a story I didn’t want to believe.

  “Jane,” he stated.

  Just like that.

  Nothing else. Only my name.

  My name for the first time now that everything would be different, now that there was no going back to the time of before—there would never be a going back to that before. My name, because, really, what else could Handel say?

  “It was you,” I said to him, and I could feel the heart inside my chest breaking apart as we looked at each other, stared at each other with new eyes. Falling to pieces and disintegrating into a pile of dry heart dust. “It was you all along. You and Cutter, and if I had to guess who else, your brother.”

  Tears ran down Handel’s face. “Jane, please. I can explain.”

  But I was already hardening myself. Turning myself to stone. “No,” I said. “No, you can’t.” I grabbed my clothes from the floor, stepping into my skirt and throwing on my blouse. Fumbling and stumbling as I buttoned everything up. “It’s too late for that,” I said.

  Then I walked out of Handel’s room. I walked right by him, careful not to let any part of me touch any part of him. Slowly, carefully, I made my way down the stairs.

  “Jane,” I heard him say from above, just as my shaking hand was reaching for the knob on the door to the outside.

  My name from his lips for the last time, I thought to myself then.

  I would make sure of it.

  • • •

  I ran from the house. I ran and ran and then I ran some more.

  When I finally slowed, I saw that I’d made it all the way to the next town. Somehow this was soothing. A relief to be out of my town. The town where I was no longer safe. The place where I thought people took care of one another, where I thought people looked out for one another. Where everyone knew everyone else, where kids still played hide-and-seek at night, and where we all held the beach so sacred in our hearts.

  Idyllic. As though from another era.

  I laughed out loud, a hysterical sort of laugh.

  Who had I been kidding all this time?

  A man out walking his dog took one look at me and then crossed to the other side of the street.

  This only made me laugh harder.

  Was I too frightening to see?

  I went straight to the center of this town, this town that was not mine. I didn’t have my purse because I’d left my bag at Handel’s, and I didn’t have any money in my pockets, either, but that didn’t stop me from going in and out of stores.

  I stole something.

  I stole it from the drugstore. A bottle of dark blue nail polish. I studied it while I sat on a bench down the block.

  Now I’ve got something in common with Handel.

  I’m a thief.

  I started to cry.

  It was the crying that finally sent me headed home. I couldn’t seem to stop once I started. All day I’d been blindly going about, laughing and talking to myself like some crazy girl, like nothing bad had happened. Nothing horrible and awful and utterly unspeakable. I hadn’t shed a tear.

  But when the tears came, they came with the force of a storm.

  Sobs choked my throat when I arrived at my destination. By then it was getting dark. I don’t know how many hours had passed between leaving Handel’s and coming back here. It wasn’t my house where I went, either, or Bridget’s or even Tammy’s. I surprised even myself when I realized where I was headed, but when I did, I knew it was the right place to go.

  Michaela was sitting on her front steps when I got there.

  Sitting in the dark, her long dark hair falling all around her.

  She looked up.

  “Jane,” she said, a mixture of relief and expectation, like somehow she’d already known I was on my way.

  I sat down next to her on the stoop and curled into a ball.

  She put her arms around me.

  When I finally caught my breath, when the sobs slowed enough that I could speak, I said, “I have something to tell you, Michaela. You were right. You were right about him all along.” I held out my hand, my fingers balled tight into a fist. Opened it to reveal the necklace I’d found in Handel’s room.

  She stared at the broken heart chain lying along my skin. Then looked up at me. There wasn’t triumph or smugness in her eyes. Just sadness. Sadness and I think some shock. “I know, Jane.”

  I inhaled sharply. Closed my hand, pushing the necklace deep into the pocket of my skirt. “You know? What do you know?”

  She shifted her gaze. Watched as an ant carried a crumb three times its size along the cement toward the grass. “Handel went to the police.”

  This, I wasn’t expecting. I straightened up, my back like a rod. “He what?”

  “He told them everything. The police have been looking for you. Everyone has been out looking for you. My dad. The O’Connors. Seamus and Bridget and Tammy. Your mother is worried sick. We’ve all been worried. My father wants to speak to you.”

  “Your father?”

  She nodded. “He wants to make sure you’re all right. He wants to take your statement.”

  All the air deflated out of me. My body caved into a C, my shoulders meeting my knees.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go together. Bridget and Tammy and Seamus and your mother and anyone else you want will go with you. You’re not alone, Jane. You never were.”

  “I am, though,” I whispered, my throat hoarse. It hurt to speak. It hurt to breathe. Everything about me hurt and Handel was responsible. It seemed impossible, but I knew it was the truth. “It’s my fault that I’m alone. I did this to myself. You warned me so many times.”

  “But, Jane, I didn’t know. No one did.”

  I laughed, the taste sour in my mouth. “Obviously. Me, least of all.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.” Her eyes flickered away, somewhere off in the distance, before settling on me again. Michaela seemed like she was hesitating. She took a deep breath. “There’s something else you should know. About Handel.”

  I nodded. Braced myself for more terrible news. A bird flew over our heads. A sparrow. It landed in the small plot of grass in front of Michaela’s house, and my eyes went to it. Stayed and watched it prance around in all that lush green.

  “Handel was there that night,” Michaela said carefully. “But he wasn’t there originally. He wasn’t part of the plan for the break-in.”

  A tiny sliver of hope pierced my heart. I tore my eyes from the sparrow. “No?”

  Michaela shook her head. “That’s what he said.”

  The sliver in my heart grew and expanded, the hope painful and sharp, like it was prying me apart. “What else did he say?”

  Michaela reached out and plucked one of the daisies from the pot brimming with them on the porch. She stared at its delicate white petals. “He said he only went to the house to try to keep you safe from his brother and his friends, that he went because he wanted to save you, that he tried to save your father. That it all went wrong, that you and he were both in the wrong place at the wrong time, and your father most of all.”

  Michaela offered me the flower then, and I took it. “Do you think he was telling the truth?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Jane. I think that question you’ll need to ask him.”

  The hope left me then, vacati
ng my heart, the thought of facing Handel after he’d lied all summer long, keeping everything he knew from me, seemed impossible. No amount of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time could surmount this. Nothing would change what he failed to say all those days and nights we spent together. He’d wasted that chance.

  Wasted our chance.

  “Jane?” Michaela’s voice brought me back from my thoughts.

  Her eyes were on the daisy.

  Its stem was twisted around my fingers, threaded through them, crushed. I untangled it and set it aside on the wooden slats of the porch. It lay there, limp and dying. “I don’t want to ask Handel anything right now. I don’t know if I ever want to see him again,” I added, though I knew this wasn’t true.

  I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Found the strength to stand. Michaela got up, and she held out her arm for me to take. I leaned on her because I needed to. I leaned on her because I could. But I leaned on her, too, because she was my friend and I could trust her all the way through, and this I needed most of all. Michaela was good all the way through, even if I no longer was. We walked down to the wharf, to the place where my father once worked, to the place where everyone was waiting for me, together.

  ONE MONTH LATER

  I SAW HIM BEFORE he saw me.

  Handel sat at a long brown table, the kind they have in the school cafeteria for lunchtime. His eyes were downcast, and there were dark circles underneath. He’d cut his hair. Gone was the long mane that was always twisting in the breeze, that he was always brushing away from his face and that I’d loved to run my fingers through. It was so short now, he looked younger than before, almost boyish.

  Almost innocent.

  The guard led me into the empty gray room, the light dull except for a small window high up in the back corner. He left me there. Turned around and went to stand by the door.

  Right then Handel looked up and saw me. His eyes went wide.

  “Jane,” he said quietly, but the pain in his voice was clear.

  I went to him.

  I sat down on the other side of the table, facing him for the first time since I’d fled his room on that awful day that had at first been wonderful. By the time I looked into those familiar dark eyes, the ones I knew could hold me like no other boy in this world, I’d turned my heart totally and fully to stone.

  What else could I have done?

  Handel pressed his hands flat into the table’s surface, pale skin against all that ugly brown. “I’ve come here every single day,” he said. “Hoping that one time I’d see you walk through that door, wanting to talk to me.”

  I blinked. I couldn’t speak.

  It was probably better this way. For now.

  “I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “You’re all I can think about.”

  I wondered if he might cry. He should cry.

  I certainly wanted to.

  The guard shifted behind us, the faint step of one shoe, the hard rustle of stiff fabric.

  Handel glanced at him over my shoulder. “It’s almost killed me not to see you, not to have the chance to explain.”

  “Explain?” I said, the word like a punch coming out of me. It filled the dim gray room, exploding through the stuffy air. “How could you ever explain?” I asked, but even through the anger I could hear the pleading in my words. I wanted Handel to convince me I wasn’t wrong about him—that I’d never been wrong about him. More than this, that I hadn’t been wrong about us.

  Handel stayed steady. His eyes didn’t leave me. “You don’t know the whole story.”

  I drank in his stare, though I tried not to. I’d missed how he looked at me, like I was the only thing in life that mattered. “I know enough,” I told him. “I know the important parts. I know that you lied. You lied all summer,” I added, as if he didn’t know this already—as if it needed to be repeated. “You had all summer to explain to me, and you chose not to.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be there that night, Jane. I wasn’t going to be.”

  I looked away then. Stared at the only ray of light cutting across the room, tiny particles of dust floating in it, glowing like phosphorescence in dark waters. “So I heard.” I kept my voice even. “If it wasn’t supposed to be you, then why are you in here?” I asked, my eyes darting all around this dank visiting room. Everywhere but Handel.

  “Because I should have gone to the police earlier. Because I knew the whole time and didn’t say anything. Because I deserve to be punished,” he added, his voice thick with remorse.

  “You do,” I said quietly, my eyes on the wall.

  “Jane,” Handel said. My name again, but I didn’t turn back to him. “I only went when I was called and only then to try and keep you safe.”

  This made me laugh. I could taste the bitterness in it. “A lot of good that did my father.”

  “Jane—”

  “What, Handel?” I asked, my eyes on him now. It was all I could do not to stand over him and scream. “What could you possibly say to make this right? Maybe it’s true what you claim, and you went to the O’Connors’ that night to try to fix a break-in gone wrong, but it doesn’t change what you did afterward. Was I just some sick game to you and your friends? To you and that Cutter? For you and your brothers? Some fucked-up fantasy you needed to fulfill? Get the girl you held hostage to fall in love with you? To sleep with you, too? Did you report to them what I was like in bed?” It was there that I stopped.

  “No.”

  “That’s all? Just ‘no’?”

  The way Handel watched me now, with more love in his eyes than I had ever seen—love and vulnerability and strength, too—it radiated out from him, a light in the fog of this room. I had to turn away. My heart, it was softening. Despite everything, it was. I could feel it. Handel could still do that to me. Take my heart and mold it however he’d like. I could make him into a lying monster if I didn’t see him, but now that he was here before me, the monster disappeared, and all that was left was the boy I loved who obviously still loved me back. Who—somewhere deep inside—I knew had never meant to hurt me.

  “I didn’t plan to fall in love with you,” Handel said, as though he’d read my mind, like always, like nothing had changed and instead of this visit happening in a detention center, we were in his room in his bed, lying across his sheets.

  “You want to talk about love,” I said. “Here?”

  “I do love you.”

  This made me wince.

  “I didn’t plan any of this,” he went on.

  I kept my eyes lowered; I wanted my heart to solidify, a tiny iceberg drifting at my center. But I made the mistake of staring at Handel’s hands, and all I could think about then were his fingertips on my skin. “Well, what did you plan, then?” I managed. “How was it that you ended up dating the girl you held hostage?”

  “I just . . . I needed to find out what you knew. If you knew anything at all. If you could identify them. Us,” he corrected. “They were afraid you would figure out who they were and go to the police. They were going to kill you before you could. I told them I would take care of . . . the situation. I wanted to keep you safe.”

  My gaze rose to his face—I couldn’t help it. “Right. So that’s why you talked to me that first day on the beach. It wasn’t because you thought I was beautiful or because I caught your attention. You planned our encounter. You wanted to know if I’d recognize your voice.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either.

  I didn’t, either.

  Then all he said was, “Can you ever forgive me?”

  My knuckles were white from the way they’d balled so tight into fists. It hurt to breathe. “No,” I whispered. “Never,” I said, even though this was a lie. With time I could forgive him. With time I might.

  Handel inhaled sharply. The room was
so still. So silent.

  “You broke my heart,” I said, realizing that even now, even after finding out the truth, Handel still had the power to undo me, to see right through everything, my clothes, my skin, my heart, leaving me exposed and raw and vulnerable. I was sure, too, certain beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even now the only thing Handel wanted was to love me fiercely and gently until I was whole again. That in loving me this summer, he’d handed over so much power to me, freely and openly, in such a way that I was stronger now, stronger and more confident, despite everything else.

  True love will do that to you.

  And this part, the love we’d shared that was truer than anything I’d ever known—that I couldn’t regret. I could never. And I wouldn’t.

  Handel placed his palms flat against the table, his fingers spread wide. “You said before that the first time I spoke to you wasn’t because I thought you were beautiful or because you’d just caught my attention—but you’re wrong,” he said. “I’d seen you at school and had always thought you were beautiful. There was something about you that made me look twice, that made me want to talk to you, Jane.” He turned away a moment, his profile sharp. Then he went on. “I loved you from the moment I saw you in that window at the professor’s house, even before I went inside. I loved you even if I didn’t know it then. I think I’ve loved you all along.” Handel’s eyes were glassy with tears, the second time I’d seen them this way. “I probably always will.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, the words choking me.

  I said this, but it wasn’t true.

  I’d probably always love Handel, too, no matter how hard I tried not to. But this I didn’t say to him. How could I?

  Instead, I said: “I hate you.”

  Because this was true, too.

  Sometimes love and hate can be so closely intertwined that you can’t tell them apart. So close they can even become one and the same. “Please don’t hate me. Please. Jane?”

  I looked at him one last time. “What, Handel?”

  “Even if you hate me, I won’t stop loving you.”

  As he hung his head, waiting for some sign of hope from me, any sign that I might someday forgive him, that our love was powerful enough to overcome all of this—I realized something so clearly.